


Deep Down

by VagrantWriter



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Torture, Predator/Prey, Revenge, Serial Killers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-16
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-08-02 19:43:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16311512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VagrantWriter/pseuds/VagrantWriter
Summary: Ramsay's first, and last, mistake was assuminghewas the predator.Something macabre for the Halloween season.





	Deep Down

**Author's Note:**

> For my last few Halloween fics, poor Theon has been on the receiving end of the horror, so I figured, why not mix it up a bit? This fic is part "Last House on the Left" and Edgar Allan Poe. Hope you enjoy.

Red hair. Ah, he hadn’t had a redhead in a while. He could already see it, spilling around his pillow, her head lolling as he fucked her.

She was smiling at him, her slender fingers caressing his as she took the proffered glass. She was pretty, and knew it. Ramsay remembered another pretty face, another flirty smile. It was always the pretty ones, the arrogant ones, who were so fun to break.

“Thanks for the drink,” she said, lifting the glass to her lips. The rim came away with a red lipstick print. “I’m Alayne.”

He didn’t care about her name. “Ramsay,” he said and scooted his barstool closer to her. “What’s a pretty girl like you doing in a dive like this by yourself?”

She smiled and looked down into her beer, shyly. Or coyly. “Looking for a bit of company, I suppose.”

“Yeah?” He leaned in. “I could do with some company myself.” He reached out, and when she didn’t flinch, he gently brushed his finger along the long lock of hair running down her face and to her shoulder. She followed his movement out of the corner of her eye, a small, quirked smile on her lips, and while she was not looking at his other hand, he quickly dropped the tablet into her drink. “You don’t live around here,” he stated, stalling her while the tablet fizzled away.

“How did you guess?”

“I’d remember seeing someone as pretty as you around.” He twirled the lock around his finger. Her eyebrows were slightly darker, but still definitely red. It was her natural color, which meant the curtain would match the drapes. He couldn’t wait.

“I’m visiting friends in town,” she said.

“Anyone I would know?”

She smiled mischievously. “Probably not.”

Her drink had calmed down, so he leaned back in his seat and let her grab for her glass. She paused as she lifted it to her lips again, and his heart beat with anticipation. He had to force himself not to watch too intently, lest she pick up on his eagerness. He had gotten pretty good at not spooking them, but in the beginning, he had scared off more than one.

She didn’t look scared, though. Instead, she lifted the glass towards him, that same mischievous smile on her face. “You don’t have a drink.”

He smiled back at her then turned and slammed his hand on the counter. “Damon!” he called to the bartender, and was surprised when it wasn’t Damon who came to take his order, but rather some pretty boy with dark, curly hair. Ramsay didn’t recognize him. “Where’s Damon?”

“Went out for a smoke,” the pretty boy muttered.

That idiot. He knew not to leave when Ramsay was making a move. He was supposed to be his wingman. But the redhead was looking at him expectantly, and so, with a disgusted sigh, Ramsay lifted his hand. “A glass of the boar’s head.”

“Sure thing.” The new guy was fast, Ramsay would give him that. And he was pretty. Ramsay would ask Damon about him later, see if he had any friends or family in town who would miss him. For the time being, though, he had a pretty redhead waiting for him. She would be more than enough entertainment for quite some time. He smirked as he lifted his frothing mug towards her. “There. No fun drinking alone, is it?”

She raised one of those lovely, naturally red eyebrows. “Race you to the bottom.”

She was making this too easy.

They clinked glasses and tossed their heads back. Ramsay drained his drink in one go, and when he came back up for breath, he saw that she had barely gotten half of hers down.

“Lightweight,” he teased her.

She brushed her lips with the back of her hand and smiled apologetically at him. “I guess I am. My brother always says I should learn to pace myself.”

 _I bet he does_ , Ramsay thought. She was the type of girl to get drunk from one drink. He might not even need the tablet.

“He’s so overprotective of me,” she went on, running her finger along the rim of her glass. Flecks of foam clung to the sides, a marker for how much she’d put away. Ramsay wondered if it was enough. “He certainly wouldn’t approve of me accepting drinks from strange men in strange bars.”

Ramsay grunted. “Your brother sounds like a stuck-up cunt. No offense.”

She giggled. “He can be, for sure.” Then her face grew serious. “I understand it, though. A childhood friend of ours went missing in high school. Went out drinking, looking for a quick hookup. Never came home the next day, or the next.”

“That’s rough,” Ramsay said. He didn’t really care, but if he could keep her talking until the drugs kicked in, before she even realized something was wrong… “Maybe she ran away.”

“He,” she corrected. “That’s what we thought at first. He’d had a big fight with my brother. But then we found his car at the bottom of a lake.”

“Drunk driving,” Ramsay said with a mock sigh of regret. “Which reminds me, you’ll let me take you home if you’re not feeling okay to drive, right?”

“You’ve had more to drink than I have,” she chuckled. It was a little unnerving how quickly she could go from serious to bubbly. And now she was back to serious. “They didn’t find his body. In the car, I mean. And all of his stuff was still inside. They put out a search for him, but…” She shrugged. “It really hit my brother hard, y’know.” Ramsay noticed she hadn’t touched her beer again.

“Yeah,” he agreed, a little uneasily. “I lost a friend when I was younger too.” He didn’t know why he told her that. He never spoke of Heke to anyone. Not even to Damon and the others. _Just trying to get her to let her guard down_ , he told himself. They were so much more fun to play with when they gave him something to work with. Later, he could taunt her about her brother, how he must be wondering where she was while he was peeling her skin off.

“Oh, no, he wasn’t dead,” she said suddenly, sitting up straight. “He turned up again, three months later.” She pinned him with a look. A look that cut straight into him, through him. A chill ran up the back of his neck then. “He had some very disturbing stories to tell, about a man who kept him locked in a storm cellar and tortured him for weeks on end.”

Ramsay balked. Was she…did she know? _What_ did she know?

 _Nothing_ , he told himself, even as her look said otherwise. Shit, she was looking at him like she knew _everything_. But if she knew about the cellar, about the bodies, she wouldn’t be here, would she? She’d go the police.

Maybe she suspected, but she couldn’t have any evidence. Nothing beyond anything circumstantial. Her story was bullshit. None of his playthings had ever gotten away. He knew where each and every one lay.

 _She’s playing with me_ , he realized as she stared at him, waiting for him to respond. He did _not_ like to be played with.

“Yeah,” he said at last. Heat crept up his collar, and beads of perspiration formed at his temples. He needed to get some air. “There are some real sickos in the world.”

So what? So what if she suspected? She obviously didn’t know him well enough if she thought she could waltz in here and accuse him of, what, exactly? And anyway, it wasn’t like she could do anything about it. Fuck, it was hot in here.

“Excuse me, I’ve got to…” He stood. Too quickly. The world spun, and he found himself leaning heavily against the bar.

Something was wrong.

“Yes,” the girl said. “There _are_ some real sickos, aren’t there?” She spun on her barstool, lifted her glass, and poured the remainder into the bucket of pretzels on the counter. He stared, uncomprehending. She had done something. Swapped the drinks or…

He felt a presence behind him. A strong arm on his shoulder. The bartender! The pretty boy. He had… _they_ had…

“For a man who uses rohypnol so often, you really don’t seem to recognize the symptoms when they hit _you_ ,” a voice said.

And that was all he remembered before everything faded to gray.

 

***

 

He came to—slowly, groggily. His head was pounding. It felt like he had been drinking rusty nails. He blinked.

“Shit, he’s waking up.”

“Help me get him in here.”

Whose voices were those?

He felt hands on him, lifting him, pushing him, manhandling him. He tried to fight back, but his limbs had no strength. He couldn’t see clearly through his fogged-up eyes. He groaned. They shoved him into something—the boot of a car, maybe? He heard something slam above him. Then he couldn’t see anything. And then he faded back into unconsciousness.

 

***

 

He awoke again, and for real, somewhere dark and cramped. He couldn’t see anything, but he could feel the walls pressing in on him. Soft. Padded. He tried to sit up. His forehead met with something solid, and he flopped back down with a groan. He couldn’t move his arms, but his fingers brushed along the walls. They were rough-smooth, like velvet, but solid underneath. Not a bed.

The air was chill. His skin prickled. The walls closed in so tightly, his warm breath bounced back at him. The smell of stale alcohol brought it all back. He was in the boot of some asshole’s car. The girl? The bartender? Both of them? They’d planned this from the start.

He smacked his hand against the lid. “Hey!” he screamed. “Let me out of here, you cunt!”

No response.

He didn’t expect one. His own playthings screamed all sorts of things at him. Threats. Pleas. Promises. Ramsay enjoyed it immensely. Well, he wasn’t going to give his captors that satisfaction.

He punched upwards. His knuckles hit something solid behind the padding with a hollow, metallic _thump_. There was no give. He tried again.

Ramsay was not a weak person, but he could not get the lid to give, even a bit.

In frustration, he brought his legs up, fumbling in the tight place. His knees hit the lid. The lid did not give, but something fell with the clink. Something that was cold as it brushed his fingers. He flinched at the unexpected touch. Then he quickly regained himself. Knees down, he reached for the thing. The smooth, metallic thing, with a ridge along it. The thing that fit easily into the palm of his hand. After a second, he realized what it was.

A lighter.

He flicked it on. A small, yellow flame gave him his first view of the boot.

It wasn’t a boot.

The lid, covered in a pleated, cream velvet, sat little more than a hand’s width from his face. On either side, more intricately folded velvet walls kept his arms from jutting out to any meaningful degree; he had to tuck them in to move them at all. And farther down, he saw his legs, almost as if they weren’t really his legs, stretching out until the pitiful light was swallowed again by darkness. But he knew, beyond his tiny ring of light, there was another wall. And he knew then how closed in he truly was.

Domeric had been buried in a similar casket.

Ramsay drew in a sharp breath through his nose. Shit.

Shit.

The lighter illuminated something else. A scrap of paper pinned to his shirt with a sewing needle. He undid the pin and held the flame close. It was difficult. There was not even enough room to sit up, even a little. But if he held it just right and squinted, he could make out the scratchy writing.

 

_Dear Ramsay,_

_If you are reading this, then you have found my last parting gift to you. I am glad it gives you enough light to read by. I hope you’ll forgive my writing. My hand is not as steady as it once was._

_I don’t know if you remember me. I know I wasn’t your first and I know I wasn’t your last. But rest assured, you_ have _hurt your last victim, though you did not know it when you woke up this morning. You thought you had found an easy victim in Sansa—or Alayne, as she introduced herself to you. But Sansa is quite alright. Your friend Damon, however, is not. We haven’t dealt with all your friends yet, but we will get to them._

_If you taught me nothing else, you taught me patience._

_So, by now you’ve surmised where you are and how you got there. Now you know what it is like to wake up underground, in the dark. I wish you could know what the rest is like. To be stripped and violated and opened up and ripped apart. I wish you could know what it feels like to live in your own filth. But I could not ask that of my friends. I would not make monsters of them._

_Do you even keep track of them all? Or do they all run together? All the people you have tortured, raped, and murdered over the years. How many families are waiting for someone who will never come home?_

_I was almost one of them. Do you remember? You may; you may not. I don’t know if you have a standard method for disposing of your victims. Maybe in the warmer months you bury them, when the ground is soft enough to be dug up. But it was the dead of winter when you decided to get rid of me. You drove me out to the middle of the woods, told me you were going to let me go. I remember the drive. It was the first I’d seen of the sky in three months. And it was so cold. I never believed you were going to let me go. I knew you were going to kill me. You drove me to a river. It was frozen over. You pulled me out of your pickup. You hit me in the back of the head with a heavy rock. You dumped me in the river. You thought you had gotten rid of me. But you hadn’t._

_They pulled me from the river. A father and daughter who were ice fishing. They revived me. The doctor said the freezing water slowed my heart rate, but I think the proper term is “medical miracle.” I was dead, legally speaking, for forty-five minutes. So in a way, you did succeed. You did kill me. Just not enough._

_But I’m not going to make the same mistake with you. By now my friends have filled in the grave we dug for you. It’s quite removed from civilization. And it is regulation depth. So, please, feel free to kick and scream all you want. It will only use more of what precious little oxygen you have left, and nobody is coming for you. There’s nobody around for a while. Nobody but a redhead with a shotgun, in case you do somehow manage to break through twenty-gauge carbon steel and six feet of earth._

_No, here’s how you’re really going to die. This casket has a total space close to twenty-eight square feet. That might sound like a lot, but when your air starts running out, I guarantee you, it won’t_ feel _like a lot. In a little while, your worthless breath will convert a majority of the oxygen into carbon dioxide. At that point, hypoxia will set in. You will begin to start thinking less clearly. You will likely become confused, dizzy, and uncoordinated—if you find yourself able to move, that is. This casket is little over two feet wide, and a little less than two feet thick._

_As you lie there, your body will begin to understand that something is very wrong. Your breathing and heart rate will become faster, resulting in pulmonary hypertension. I know from the tools you kept in your cellar that you have more than a passing interest in medical terminology, so I’m hoping you know what that is. You can fill your lungs to bursting, but it won’t help. You are sealed in. An airtight lock and six feet of earth keep new air from flowing in. Your tissues will slowly be starved of oxygen and your organs will sustain damage and begin to shut down, one by one. The less important ones first, like blood flow to your extremities. Your brain is already working on lowered oxygen levels, but the random firing of neurons may cause hallucinations. I hope they do and that they are horrific._

_You’ll know you’ve entered the final stage when your heart rate begins to slow. Your breathing will become shallow. Your body is trying its hardest to keep you alive, but it’s a losing battle. Soon after, you will lose consciousness. Your brain has been damaged beyond the point of revival. You will be granted a merciful sleep as your body finally dies._

_What happens after that? I saw something on the other side, during the forty-five minutes I was dead. Would you like to know what I saw?_

_My hand is getting tired now, so I apologize but I must end this letter._

_Yours truly,_

_Theon Greyjoy_

_P.S. Did you know that fire—from a lighter, for example—also uses up oxygen?_

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween!


End file.
